How do you think shardnets/impalers came to be? There's some pretty large space fishies out there.Wyches often compete against hellions with stunclaws to see who gets the bigger haul.You'll be surprised how efficient a succubus' agoniser will be in the water... faster than explosives.

I think the idea behind the wheat stealing was so we'd tell them if anyone made a sound, we'd take them with us to Commorragh.. and then we'd start taking their food so they couldn't feed their families. All it took was one or two to break down while realizing they could die of starvation and cry before we took them away. The number of warriors who passed out from pain without making a peep isn't great, but it's always nice to see their faces when they wake up in Commorragh anyways.First days on the job.. they're fed the wheat.

_________________Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil. - Aristotle

Lets say I want to harvest and torture souls not wheat, and vow to type ravager ever after; could some one tell me why 3 jetbikes always get heatlances, when a mere 3 points more gets you a blaster. With the jump shoot jump move of jet bikes wouldn't you want to blast them at full range giving you more cover options and less risk of getting charged, rather than have to get within 9" to melta lance.

We get blasters and lances in a ton of places, but heatlances are harder to fit into lists and work so much better against tanks. It's the same with haywire blasters.It's hard not to pass up the chance to use them and their reliability allows you to move points spent into blaster and dark lances to other things (if your list had a ton already). Not only does the heatlance do more damage to vehicles, but it costs less than a blaster, so the only real drawback is the melta range but with turbo-boosting it gets you there fast and with a cover save... you can even jump-shoot-jump with heat lances into cover sometimes if you're close enough and don't need to turbo boost.. nothing's forcing you to turbo boost right next to the reaver's target on the first turn if you can find a nice hiding spot, as long as you can reach it the next turn and get your shots off.

_________________Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil. - Aristotle

If you think about it, Reaver Jetbikes have a 21" melta range on their Heat Lances (12" move, 9" Melta), so even if you're midfield at the beginning of the turn, you can still hit pretty much anywhere on their table edge with a S6 AP1 Melta Lance.

-2 Strength in exchange for a 3 point savings, Melta, and AP1 is a great deal, and not one I'd pass up on - particularly not on a unit so well suited to getting into that melta range, and keeping out of charge range at the same time.

Last edited by Chief on Thu Apr 19, 2012 7:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Blasters are fantastic and all, but if you can take Heat Lances, DO take them. (Edit: On your Reavers. Yeah, Scourges can take them, but Haywire Blasters are just too much fun.)

They're an AP1 Melta(at 9'') Lance weapon. Don't let the strength 6 fool you, they're fantastic. Would you rather get 6+2d6 for armor penetration against a Soul Grinder/Land Raider/Monolith that is now considered AV12 with a plus one to the chart, or...strength 8 AP2 against AP2. You need a five with a blaster to pen most vehicles in the 40k universe, unless they're transports. With the Heat Lance, you only need a seven+ on 2d6, so your odds are improved.

Even if you glance with a Heat Lance, you can still wreck a non-open topped vehicle thanks to the AP1, something the Blaster can't do.

Don't get me wrong, the Blaster is an AMAZING weapon, but you should always be taking Heat Lances on your Reavers. They're super fast, so they can get into that melta range real quick. It's always funny when your opponent drops down a Soul Grinder and maybe knocks out a Raider or something, only to have it be melted by your three little Reavers the next turn.

With the Heat Lance, you only need a seven+ on 2d6, so your odds are improved.

Statistically, a result of 7 is the most common result on 2d6 happening 16.66% of the time.So you have better chances of penetrating that armor than any other result. That's actually makes the AP 1 part of it better too.

_________________Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil. - Aristotle

Lets say I want to harvest and torture souls not wheat, and vow to type ravager ever after; could some one tell me why 3 jetbikes always get heatlances, when a mere 3 points more gets you a blaster. With the jump shoot jump move of jet bikes wouldn't you want to blast them at full range giving you more cover options and less risk of getting charged, rather than have to get within 9" to melta lance.

Hehe, yeah spelling ravager properly is a good thing, otherwise Zero will hunt you down and kill you! He's done it before people, I mean do you see those guys who can't spell it around anymore, I haven't.

Lets say I want to harvest and torture souls not wheat, and vow to type ravager ever after; could some one tell me why 3 jetbikes always get heatlances, when a mere 3 points more gets you a blaster. With the jump shoot jump move of jet bikes wouldn't you want to blast them at full range giving you more cover options and less risk of getting charged, rather than have to get within 9" to melta lance.

If you want blasters, there many other options that are far more efficient then reavers....

Melta, the best keyword for anti-tank in the game, is very rare in our codex...Heatlances are the sole reason most players use reavers...

So bottom line take heatlances where availible (reavers), unless you can get haywire (scourges), so pain engines by that logic should have haywire?

My first DE board post ever, started with why don't you take "x" because comming from the ork dex lots of the DE stuff looks good on paper, and I can see a roll for every piece of kit. Competitive play and "netlisting" seem to boil codexes down to a few viable builds, with cookie cutter units spammed. What the majority of the net community thinks works is very easy to figureout. I want to know why people aren't taking unit "x" I think gives me a better understanding of the codex and the meta, and maybe a fresh look at might change the thinking. Back in the last days of the 3rd ed ork dex they wrote off orks as competitive, Then one guy showed up with a MSU max heavy weapons ork list that blindsided players in competition.

Often times people will simply look at an option and try to evaluate it solely on it's stats.They can compare with other things in the same book and even similar things in other books but that has it's limits.The problem with this is the value of an option goes far beyond what it's stats say, and the more you play and experience what makes things effective, the more you realize how many different things affect an option's worth.The heat lance / haywire thing is a perfect example, and yes I do see the talos as a great platform for haywire blasters as it can keep stunning a vehicle until it can launch an assault and tear it up with it's chain flails, etc.The stinger pod is good but anti-infantry and I could see the heat lance working somewhat possibly but the haywire blaster's range makes up for it's slowness if any vehicles the talos is heading towards manages to slip away.It's weakness is it's slowness so it counter-acts this, although you have to fit it into your list, remembering how slow the talos is and avoid/deter tarpits.The talos has been one reason why I've been looking at webway portal lists where only a few units come out of the portals, another being how reserve rolls works.

_________________Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil. - Aristotle

With the Dark Eldar codex, I can give you five competitive templates just from builds that I myself have used, all with very different playstyles from one another, and all relying on different units and synergies.

When it comes down to it though, there are certain builds for specific units that will tend to work better than others. Regardless of how much better the unit works with one configuration over another, it still works better, and so the competitive player will go with that build to give themselves as much of an edge as possible, as they know that they will be going up against opponents that will do the same..

So bottom line take heatlances where availible (reavers), unless you can get haywire (scourges)

Not quite.

If Scourges were well-suited to take Heat Lances, I'd definitely take them over the Haywire Blasters, but the thing is that they're not. Scourges with Heat Lances are simply too close ranged and there's only two ways to get them where you want them. One way is to run them up the board, but if you're hunting something in the back-field (Predator, Hammerhead, etc., the kinds of things Heat Lances are good at) you'd be firing 2nd turn at the earliest, but more likely 3rd turn. In that time your 5 T3, 4+ save models are probably going to get gunned down. The other way is to Deep-strike them much in the same manner a Chaos player Deep-strikes his Terminators. You drop them down behind a vehicle, hope they don't scatter, fire at that one vehicle and then die. The problem is that Scourges are just too expensive for that roll without getting enough high-quality shots. The Terminators are 105 points and get 3 S8 meltas, while the Scourges are 134pts and they get 2 S6 meltas.

But with the Haywire Blasters, the Scourges can keep their distance and stick to cover, as well as being able to fire first turn and being a bit more flexible in what they target.

Reavers with Heat Lances aren't just for their killing potential, either. They play some pretty serious mind-games on the enemy when you turbo-boosted them up behind their big vehicles first turn. Check out the last page of the Dark Eldar Tactica thread and there's a post in there where I quote a bunch of threads I've previously written. One of them is on Reavers.

Dark Eldar aren't just a cut-and-dry "this doesn't work because its stats aren't very good" kind of army. It's more like "this doesn't work because it doesn't synergise well with the army" or "this doesn't work because that particular gun simply doesn't work well with that particular unit".

As for the Talos, I'd probably go with the Heat Lance on it. I want that thing in combat, so I'm going to be running it every turn, but by the time it's in melta range, you should be in assault range.

Reavers with Heat Lances aren't just for their killing potential, either. They play some pretty serious mind-games on the enemy when you turbo-boosted them up behind their big vehicles first turn.

This. One hundred percent this.

My teammate and I won a 1000 points each 2v2, Dark Eldar and Eldar vs Grey Knights game because my two squads of three Reavers managed to soak up a HUGE amount of attention while A), my Archon and his four Incubi tore through two Strike Squads and Crowe(thank you Runes of Witnessing for negating his psychic power. <3), and B) my teammates missile launchers ate up their transports and Dreadnought.

One of the squads took two turns of firepower to take down. The lone Heat Lance guy ended up FLEEING, and the other squad weathered a turn AFTER that and managed to get into shootin' range of a Razorback. Even though he missed and the squad was destroyed the next turn, that shooting could have directed at my vehicles or my teammate's ultraviolent Dire Avengers.